Let`s Keep The 7 That Work

January 08, 1985

The Illinois Senate in November tried to win a reprieve for seven useful legislative commissions due to expire March 31. It succeeded only halfway; the Senate approved an extension but the House failed to act. This legislature`s final meeting Wednesday will be its last chance to keep the study commissions going--which means it`s their last realistic chance for survival. The incoming 84th General Assembly is not likely to rescue them. Even if it did, their staffs would have melted away by the time it acted.

Speaker Michael Madigan (D., Chicago) is not a fan of the commissions; he favors consolidating them all into a kind of supercommission controlled by the House and Senate leaders of both parties. That sweeping answer looked good last spring, when the legislature at last got angry about the clutter of commissions that had long since lost whatever usefulness they had. (Some never had any, except to provide workless jobs for political appointees.)

Thirty-nine of them were abolished or absorbed. Seven were extended--a partial recognition that they had done valuable service to the legislature and the public, and their fate should be given more study.

Unlike the panels appointed to study things like high school coaching methods, these seven deal with the kinds of legislative issues that never go away: public aid, mental health, legal protections for women and children, economic development, school problems, the state`s energy resources. And they provide a forum for them quite different from the usual committee hearing.

They are a meeting place for members of both chambers and parties, staff, executive branch officeholders and informed members of the public--a rich mix of views and ideas that committees of lawmakers generally lack. Rather than deciding on legislation, these commissions give it shape; they discuss bills at an early, incubating stage, before views and plans have hardened into a party policy.

The House should join the Senate in giving the commissions a reprieve, with enough time to work out details of personnel, staffing and purposes. The commissions are a useful legislative tool of a different design; they should not be thrown out with the junk.